Question 1: How many authors are included in this data set? How are
their publication date distributed throughout the timeline?
## [1] "Plato" "Aristotle" "Locke" "Hume"
## [5] "Berkeley" "Spinoza" "Leibniz" "Descartes"
## [9] "Malebranche" "Russell" "Moore" "Wittgenstein"
## [13] "Lewis" "Quine" "Popper" "Kripke"
## [17] "Foucault" "Derrida" "Deleuze" "Merleau-Ponty"
## [21] "Husserl" "Heidegger" "Kant" "Fichte"
## [25] "Hegel" "Marx" "Lenin" "Smith"
## [29] "Ricardo" "Keynes" "Epictetus" "Marcus Aurelius"
## [33] "Nietzsche" "Wollstonecraft" "Beauvoir" "Davis"
As the first step to analyze this dataset, I decided to look at how
many unique philosophers were included. We can see that there are in
total 36 unique authors belonging to different philosophy schools.
## [1] "plato" "aristotle" "empiricism" "rationalism"
## [5] "analytic" "continental" "phenomenology" "german_idealism"
## [9] "communism" "capitalism" "stoicism" "nietzsche"
## [13] "feminism"

We can also take a look at the unique philosophy schools included in
this data set and the number of works belonging to each school. There
are in total 13 distinct philosophy genres, and the school of analytic
contains the greatest amount of works in this dataset while the stoicism
contains the least amount of works. Afterwards, an interesting question
would be that how long each school lasted in the history.

From this barplot, we can roughly get an idea of how long each
philosophy school dominated the history. We can see that the school of
feminism has lasted for nearly 200 years, and the school of capitalism
has lasted for more than 150 years. Comparatively, the school of Plato,
the school of Aritotle, and the school of Nietzsche had relatively short
dominant time.
Naturally, another interesting question arise is, when was each
school first appeared in the history? If their births have to do with
certain historical events?
Based on the first glimpse of the data, we can see that most of the
philosophy schools first appeared during the modern time. Therefore, we
can draw a timeline on these modern-period philosophy schools to take a
closer look on how they were developed.
From the timeline, we can see that we have several dominant schools
including empiricism, rationalism, german idealism, and capitalism that
prospered for about two centuries. Afterwards, we have communism and
nietzsche. As we enter 20th century, several popular schools of
philosophy include phenomenology, analytic, capitalism, feminism, and
continental. Furthermore, we also realized that most of the births of
philosophy schools are closely connected with some historical
milestones. For example, the time that the school of Capitalism and the
school of Communism first appeared was relevant to the rise of social
capitalism and communism.
Question 2: How are the school distinct from each other? What is the
main theme discussed by the certain school?
In order to analyze what are the distinctions among these schools, I
decided to analyze what are the most frequent words appeared in these
philosophy works by plotting word clouds. I first removed some
meaningless words, including “one”, “will”, “must”, “may”, “can”, “way”,
“therefore”, “something”, “also”, “things”, “even”, “say”, and
“now”.













From the generated wordclouds, we can see some very interesting words
that are frequently mentioned by the philosophers. For example, the most
frequent words for empiricisms are “ideas” and “idea”. For rationalism,
the relationship among “god”, “mind”, and “body” seems to be a popular
topic. For the school of analytic, we have “true”, “sense”, “theory”,
“proposition”, “question”, and “fact”. For communism, the most frequent
words include “labour”, “value”, “capital”, “production”, and “work”,
which is actually very similar to the school of capitalism except that
they may hold an opposite opinion on these topics. For feminism, the
general topic clearly involves “women” and “men”, “mother” and “wife”,
“marriage” and life. Therefore, from these wordclouds, we have already
gained some overall perceptions and interpretations on the general
themes of these philosophy schools.
Question 3: Do these distinct philosophical schools share different
emotions or sentiments?
After analyzing what are some general topics discussed in each
distinct philosophy genre, I was also interested in whether some
philosophy schools convey a more positive attitude than other schools.
Therefore, I decided to conduct a sentiment analysis on these
philosophical works. Out of a time-saving purpose, I decided to filter
out philosophical works that are long enough to convey a sentiment. And
to save time when knitting, I saved the sentiment scores as a csv file
such that I just need to reload them when needed.

We would define the sentiment to be negative if the sentiment score
is less that -0.3, neutral if between 0.3 and -0.3, and positive if
greater than 0.3. From the barplot, we can see that most of the
philosophical works are neutral. The school of stoicism has the largest
positive rate, while the feminism has the largest negative rate.
The fact that most of the works maintain a neutral attitude is as
expected since I proposed that most philosophical articles should be
strived to argue for a perspective or topic instead of simply conveying
emotions or sentiments. It is interesting to see that Stoicism conveys a
positive attitude more frequently, which is potentially due to their
promotions of fortitude and stolidity. At the same time, I suspect that
the feminism has a more negative expression because their works
frequently involve the criticism on the patriarchy.
Conclusion
(1) There are in total 13 distinct philosophy
schools included in this data set, where the school of feminism has the
longest lasting period in history.
(2) These philosophy schools all have distinct main
topics, which is shown through the most frequent words in the works in
this data set.
(3) Most of the works maintain a neutral attitude.
However, the school of stoicism has the largest positive rate, while the
feminism has the largest negative rate comparatively.